Vilnius Academy of Arts is organizing the third intensive summer course Contemporary Past. This year it will concentrate on the issue of message transfer in visual arts: How does a piece of art communicate with the viewer? What codes, strategies or methods are used in this communication? Does it matter what the artist wants to say and what the viewer gets? What happens to a coded message while it travels from the artist’s head to that of the viewer? Is it possible to materialize the process of thought through visual signs? Should one avoid or make use of the volatility of meaning and subjective truth? How close can means of visual communication get to those of a language? How to challenge the viewer’s habits of reading visual messages? The main subject of the course refers to the location of the IP: Nida Art Colony is on the Curonian Spit, which served as a shortcut of the 19th century mail road connecting Koenigsberg and Riga (or Paris, Warsaw and St. Petersburg on the bigger scale). The course links communication by post to communication by visual representation and suggests the participants to reflect on travelling, be it a message travelling from a sender to a receiver, an idea, an object or a person. Contemporary Past seeks to offer different approaches to the chosen subject: participants will have an opportunity to deepen their knowledge in visual semiotics, to discuss selected art works with their creators, to get to know the history of the old mail route, to watch relevant documentaries and fiction.

The project is fully funded by the LLP/Erasmus Programme. Partner schools of the project are: - Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts and Design), www.konstfack.se - Art and Design University of Cluj-Napoca, www.uad.ro - Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, www.kuva.fi - Vilnius Academy of Arts, www.vda.lt Five advanced students and a tutor from each partner school can attend the course. It is conducted by tutors from partner schools and guest speakers (artists and art researchers, who present their personal strategies and insight into communication by means of visual representation).

More info on tutors and guest speakers will be available at www.contemporarypast.com soon. Contemporary Past consists of theoretical lectures, discussions, workshops, guided field trips and independent research. The first week is devoted to lectures discussions and field trips; the second – to individual research and workshops. Public review and discussion of created works will take place on the final weekend. All student participants are awarded 5 ECTS credits.

Curator and coordinator: Rasa Antanaviciute, PhD Candidate at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, main interest – social history of urban planning and public art in the first half of the 20th century, executive director of Nida Art Colony,
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Co-curator: Ulrike Gerhardt, PhD Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg, main interest – historical imaginary in contemporary video art,
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Administrator: Egle Indriunaite,
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Nida Art Colony will be holding its next open studios on April 28th. The work of three new residents for the month of April will also be presented. Max Hattler (DE/UK) Karima Klasen (DE) and Karin Karlsson (SE) will be joining our residents from March: Marianna La Rosa (US/IT/JP), and Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (FI).

A first camp of Abandoned Mystery project started on 15th of April 2012 at the Nida Art Colony. Participants from Russia, Finland, Sweden Latvia and Lithuania are invited to take part in a month-long camp consisting of a set of expeditions dedicated to phenomenon and anomalies of abandoned places.

"During the planned expeditions we will concentrate on the research of the abandoned military objects, though throughout the project we will try to think also of other kind of heritage: abandoned internet websites, unfinished films or forgotten stories" - says one of the initiators of the project Mindaugas Gapsevicius.

Abandoned Mystery seeks to explore mysterious locations and study their inner logic as an interaction between nature, people, ancient, contemporary, past and future. Participants will visit Soviet military heritages in Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad, Memel/Klaipeda and Riga, Curonian Spit, Vyborg/Russia, Liepaja, Vainode, Skrunda/Latvia as well as Porkkala, Hamina/Finland and Plateliai, Gulbiniskiai, Rimsai/Lithuania.

The results of the project will be continuously published on the project's website at www.abandonedmystery.info. We are kindly inviting to join the project and share available materials everybody who are interested in abandoned places.

The first camp is supported by the Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, the Lithuanian culture foundation and the Top Association Supporting Cultural Practices in Berlin. The project is organised by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association - www.letmekoo.lt

This Earth Day, we invite you to a free global screening event of the first One Day on Earth Motion Picture. Watch this unique film created from over 3000 hours of footage, and shot by our community in every country of the world on October 10th 2010. Together, we have created a picture of interconnected humanity never before possible. We invite you on Sunday (22.04.2012) 4 pm in Nida Art Colony with other hundreds of places worldwide to watch the movie "One Day on Earth".

Genius Loci is the first curated exhibition of artworks produced at the Nida Art Colony. The term genius loci refers to the distinctive atmosphere or pervading spirit of a place. This exhibition focuses on those works that dealt primarily with Nida as a sensory environment; Light, sound, smell, touch, narrative, communication, and experience. The definition of a place goes beyond its spatial configuration. To the fluctuating barometric pressure, the shifting of the sand, and the temperament of the water. In a remote location, the environment becomes a character with whom one must make dealings. Nature presents itself not in a romantic or nostalgic way, but as something with which you exchange time; bargaining with the wind and the water, searching, waiting. The works produced by the residents in the first year of the colony reflect the psychological effect of the conditions of living and working in Nida.

The first work to be produced at the Colony is the chronological start of the exhibition. “Raft” produced by Quentin Armand is a transient space made to exist as “a room made to stay blank without a home above”. The minimal construction of a floatation device acts metaphorically. The material, tree branches that fell from the trees, is directly related to the space of Nida. “It is not a ship, but a location”. This distinction between place and location is key, as a location has a direct set of coordinates but a place shifts in relation to other places. This is similar to a ship, or one’s place at the dinner table. This ship is ephemeral and would fall apart in the water. Thus it is both place and location, both moving and stationary, both form of transportation and an object.

The work of recent residents will also be included, such as Lena Dobrowolska’s response to Thomas Mann’s novel “Magic Mountain”. The work is a photography-based installation that utilizes the landscape of Nida as a substance to precipitate the concept of “organs without bodies” and “bodies without organs”, referencing theory developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The concept of body as collection in relation to the organ as object parallels that of place and location. Both suggest to the physical position of a subject. Where the body is the place of a subject’s location, the organ is a place in the body. To position the organ outside of the body is to redefine in and out as synonyms rather than antonyms.

The structure of the exhibition has been arranged according to aesthetic and subject rather than chronology in order to emphasize parallel and divergent approaches. While it is difficult to experience these works outside of the environment in which they were produced, and in some cases only as photographic traces, these works may be thought of as organs outside of a body. It is positioned so as to redefine the space outside of Nida as a synonym to the inside. The exhibition is curated to reflect the internal relationship between members of the ephemeral places that come to exist within the Colony.